What a shock!!! Infinite Jest is my all time favorite book. I was just about to start rereading it (for like the fifth time). How terribly sad. Some of his essays were fantastic too. Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley is a gem too if you're at all into tennis, tornadoes, or math.

By the way, even if you don't read the whole thing, read the 20 or so pages of Infinite Jest about the Eschaton Match. So much mischievous fun.

Wow. What an unfortunate loss for everyone. I usually like too many things to name favorites, but for years I could identify Infinite Jest as my favorite novel. And, of course, anyone who, by the age of 40, has a style is unique enough to be lampooned by The Onion really had achieved something.

.....learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

He couldn't find the "it" that, for himself would make it worth not giving up. (And that after--no doubt; it is clear--years of struggling with his perspective that his own "it"--the "it" the rest of us cherished about him--wasn't enough to make it worth it.)

.....learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

That is Federer!

Federer does things that are not supposed to happenen in the realm of phisics...

I graduated from Pomona last year. I was an English major, so although I never took a class with him, I saw DFW all the time in the halls, at department events, etc. Pomona's a small school, and everyone in the English department knew everyone else. He was adored by all of the students. I'm reeling right now.

This present article is more about a spectator’s experience of Federer, and its context. The specific thesis here is that if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the ’06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a “bloody near-religious experience.” It may be tempting, at first, to hear a phrase like this as just one more of the overheated tropes that people resort to to describe the feeling of Federer Moments. But the driver’s phrase turns out to be true — literally, for an instant ecstatically — though it takes some time and serious watching to see this truth emerge.

For myself, I've seen lots of Federer moments the last 2+ years I've actually watched his matches on the internet/TV. But one I'd like to point out would be a half-volley he executed against James Blake in the 2006 Masters Cup final that left everyone astonished. Nobody had ever seen a shot like that and nobody has done it since.

In all honesty, I've never read anything by David Foster Wallace and knew nothing about him, but was intrigued enough by guesst's quotation of him above to watch the Charlie Rose interview. He seemed very self-conscious about avoiding cliches. (Out of respect, I'll avoid pointing out that he finally failed to avoid the cliche of the tormented artist committing suicide.) E.g., from guesst's quote, Wallace considered the idea of "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master" to be an "old cliche." For myself, while I've encountered that idea before, I hadn't heard it expressed quite that way -- powerfully and pithily -- before. Perhaps I haven't read enough. His expression of the idea, even if he had gotten it from someone else, was valuable to me nevertheless.

Perhaps in the end, Wallace couldn't escape the feeling that all of life was a cliche. "Nothing new under the sun," and all that. The desire to do and be something completely new and original can be a real ball-buster.

The following from the Wikipedia article on Wallace also increases my posthumous respect for him:

In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, which commemorated the magazine's 150th anniversary, an invited series of authors, artists, politicians and others were asked to prepare 300 words or so on "the future of the American idea". Wallace asked whether some things were still worth dying for, and presented a "thought experiment" in which "we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea." He goes on to say that we might have to accept that every now and then "a democratic republic cannot 100% protect itself [from terrorism] without subverting the very principles that made it worth protecting." By comparison, he continues, we accept the 40,000 highway deaths each year as the price we pay for the convenience of the motor car. Finally, he asks, in the context of Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act, and warrantless wiretapping, "Have we become so selfish and scared that we don't even want to consider whether some things trump safety?"

Was a piece in the NYT Magazine a while ago which interviewed people who had survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. They all agreed that the instant they made the decision to jump they really regretted it. The theory seems to be that the urge to suicide seems to be a passing madness. Remember, folks, it always gets cloudy, but the sun always shines again.

By the way, it’s right around here, or the next game, watching, that three separate inner-type things come together and mesh. One is a feeling of deep personal privilege at being alive to get to see this; another is the thought that William Caines is probably somewhere here in the Centre Court crowd, too, watching, maybe with his mum. The third thing is a sudden memory of the earnest way the press bus driver promised just this experience.

It is a shame that he forgot that at one time he appreciated enough the privilege of being alive to realize and even write about it.

I knew 4 people in high school who later killed themselves. In every case I could say, with the benefit of hindsight, they applied a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

And no, it is not possible to know how much pain another person is in, but I do know that the only guarentee in life is change. If you live, things will change.

I have known writers who thought that you had to be drunk to write. I have known drunks who, well, that's a story for another day. Poor Hemmingway survived 3 plane crashes but suffered head injuries. He killed himself, but in those days brain injuries were not well treated. More's the pity.

In any case, somehow, drinking and suicide have been linked, by some, to good writing. I prefer sobriety and living, but then again, I don't write. I read.

Yes. From a Chicago Trib piece, "He told me that after his first burst of fame...he'd entered a hospital and asked to be put on suicide watch.

'In a weird way it seemed like there was something very American about what was going on, that things were getting better and better for me in terms of all the stuff I thought I wanted, and I was getting unhappier and unhappier,' he said."

What his writing does show is extreme emotional conservatism, an inability to initiate or maintain close personal relationships. For Wallace, genuine intimacy was virtually impossible, the cause of which may be traced back to childhood.

When depressive strokes are essentially absent in one's handwriting, especially following a suicide, we're left to evaluate what is there in order to draw a conclusion. In this instance, we start and end with Wallace's emotional conservatism as the primary, negative force. It was the strongest influence in his personality... the silent culprit that eventually did him in.